The banality of book reviews.

Does this (here and here) happen often? Does the Times often review the same book twice? I can’t think of another instance like this, I have to admit, but I don’t pay much attention to the Sunday Book Review anymore, so I can’t say for certain.

Regardless, in this case, if you don’t feel like clicking on links, the book in question is Sir John Keegan’s The American Civil War: A Military History. Which book, I should say, I haven’t read and won’t be reading. And not just because the second review linked above, authored by the normally genial James McPherson, savages Keegan’s efforts as terribly sloppy, but also because, coincidentally, just last week Eric and I taught Richard Evans’s Lying About Hitler in our graduate seminar.

As I starting reading the Evans, I kept thinking about McPherson’s review and about the responsibilities historians have when it comes time to consider deeply flawed work produced by people they admire. It seems to me that reviews often are nowhere near as harsh — with “harsh” here meaning analytically rather than personally acute — as they should be. I’ve typically assumed this arises out of misplaced professional courtesy, a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I attitude, or because everyone knows everyone else in their sub-field, meaning they worry that their professional networks will collapse if they take off the gloves in a review.

Anyway, much of Evans’s book is about historians who, after notorious Holocaust denier David Irving dragged Deborah Lipstadt into court for having called him a liar (you can find more of the case’s backstory, not to mention lots of useful documents, here), were forced to take off the gloves and assess, in public and for the record, how their colleagues went about doing history: both their methods and the final products they produced. It’s a fascinating and somewhat distressing story.

And like I said, when reading the Evans I had just finished McPherson’s review of Keegan, which is uncommonly critical — if still respectful of all that Sir John has accomplished in the field of military history. So what, I wondered, had caused McPherson to train his guns on Keegan? Because McPherson, though he’s defined the field of Civil War studies and won a Pulitzer Prize for his efforts, isn’t known as a scholar who defends his turf or lashes out in print. By contrast, he’s renowned for his intellectual generosity and his personal decency; he’s a man who manages to be at once folksy and decorous. And while that might describe the tone of his review of Keegan, the substance is brutal, citing, chapter and verse, major errors of fact.

Then, on page 240 of the American edition of Evans’s book, I found this odd tidbit:

If it was depressing that a historian of Erickson’s [author’s note: Professor John Erickson] standing could leap into print without having actually considered the details of the trial and the judgment, then it was, if anything, more depressing that two other historians of the older generation, Sir John Keegan and Professor David Cameron Watt, actually testified on Irving’s behalf in court.

Wait, what? Keegan testified on Irving’s behalf? Well, okay. So what did he say?

Like many who seek to shock, he [author’s note the second: remember this is Keegan on Irving] may not really believe what he says and probably feels astounded when taken seriously. He has, in short, many of the qualities of the most creative historians. He is certainly never dull. Prof. Lipstadt, by contrast, seems as dull as only the self-righteously politically correct can be. Few other historians had ever heard of her before this case. Most will not want to hear from her again. Mr. Irving, if he will only learn from this case, has much that is interesting to tell us.

As Evans later notes, it’s important to remember that Keegan is not himself a Nazi sympathizer. But he is, apparently, a proud member of an old boy’s club that has more room on its rolls for Holocaust deniers than for women who expose them. Or at least that’s the most charitable reading I can offer of Keegan’s views.

In the end, I have no idea if McPherson knew about this episode. But I’m guessing that he did. And I have no idea if that knowledge about Sir John’s past liberated McPherson from the shackles of polite scholarly discourse. But I’m guessing that it did. Now, I suppose, if only more historians would defend Holocaust deniers, the Sunday Book Review could become a lot more interesting and informative.

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jonathand is right — but my question is, why? NYT review slots are sparse; why use two for one book? Or rather, how do they decide which books are deserving of two boosts? (It’s not for balance — as Ari says, it’s rare for a review to be so unambiguously negative.)

Finding out about Keegan’s behavior was one of the most disappointing aspects of Lying About Hitler. Well, that and reading Christopher Hitchens defending Irving’s work on Churchill, *after* Lying About Hitler had come out and made it perfectly clear that none of Irving’s work could be trusted.

Sometimes I think there’s just a meme that runs through the editorial offices. This week there was a review of a spy thriller set in China, a recommendation of same, and an op-ed/analysis piece by a different writer of spy thrillers set in China. All usefully timed to coincide with Obama’s Asian tour, of course, but still…

And I might be completely crazy, but sometimes it seems to me that high-brow NYC publications (the NYT, NYer, NYRB) all use the same unusual word or phrase (e.g. “festooned”; “ultima thule”) within the same week. Probably just apophenia run amuck, though.

i started the thread by trying to make conciliatory, there-but-for-the-grace-ish noises myself, but was eventually forced to give up any defense of keegan.

the fact that keegan had spoken in defense of irving never came up in that thread. that’s very, very disappointing. the ties of tribalism that allow keegan to see irving as basically a decent sort and lipstadt as beneath contempt are an unfortunate fact of british society.

In his 1996 book-length exploration of the historiography of World War II, The Battle for History, Keegan lavishes praise on Irving’s Hitler’s War:

The most value of books in this category [i.e. the role of leadership in the war], however, in my view, is one that has been called “the autobiography that Hitler did not write” — David Irving’s Hitler’s War. Irving is a controversial figure, an Englishman who has identified with the German war experience to a remarkable degree, who has offered a cash reward to anyone producing written evidence of Hitler’s authorization of the “Final Solution,” and who currently champions extreme right-wing politics in Europe. Nevertheless, he is an historian of formidable powers, having worked in all the major German archives, discovered important deposits of papers himself, and interviewed many of the survivors or their families and intimates. (p. 50)

After describing Irving’s vision of a wholly rational Hitler at some length, Keegan returns with more praise, this time ever so slightly qualified….

No historian of the Second World War can afford to ignore Irving. His depiction of Hitler, by its relation of the war’s development to the decisions and responses of the Führer’s headquarters, is a key corrective to the Anglo-Saxon version, which relates the war’s history solely in terms of Churchillian defiance and the growth of the Grand Alliance. Nevertheless, it is a flawed vision, for it is untouched by moral judgment. For Irving, the Second World War was a war like other wars — a naked struggle for national self-interest — and Hitler, one war leader among others. Yet, the Second World War must engage our moral sense… (pp. 51-52)

I remember reading this at the time it came out and being a bit puzzled by Keegan’s take on Irving (whom I hadn’t read). Treating “moral judgment” as somehow separable from doing good history troubled me. And a version of World War II in which Hitler was just another leader out for national advantage seemed to me worse than merely amoral (especially in light of its authors views on the Holocaust, which Keegan more or less admits).

Incidentally, a few pages later, Keegan also praises Irving’s biography of Göring.

Given McPherson’s stature in the field, one could read his review of Keegan as a response to the earlier Times review as well, which, while critical, generally seems to take Keegan at face value. McPherson, through the cataloguing of errors does not simply claim that there are occasional misstatements of fact, but that, taken together, there is little of value in Keegan’s analysis either. If the Times had printed only one review of Keegan, readers may take it as a lesser work than McPherson’s, to be sure, but one that deserves a place on the shelf. McPherson’s review suggests otherwise.

I think that’s a good point, Brian, that McPherson wasn’t writing in a vacuum but instead was offering a corrective. That said, I do still wonder if Keegan’s past caused McPherson not to pull any of his punches. It’s pure speculation on my part, of course, but what’s a blog for if not to speculate.

1. The book is predicted (by Sam Tanenhaus, if no-one else) to be Important enough for a prominent Sunday review. Tanenhaus likes or respects the author.

2. A Big Name Outside Reviewer agrees to review the book for Sunday publication

3. choose one or more:

a. It becomes clear in advance that BNOR’s review will be highly negative. Tanenhaus quickly throws the book at Kakutani or some other of the staff, who will read and review at lightning speed. This inhouse review will not be as knowledgably cutting as the BNOR review, but it can be ready *sooner*, published in the week of the book’s release. The BNOR review can be delayed slightly (in this case 2 weeks), to reduce the sting.

b. It becomes clear in advance that BNOR’s review will miss its deadline. In-house reviewer to the rescue! If it’s an Important book, there needs to be *something* up for the book release, the BNOR review can sail in late or never.

Someone should collect statistics, though. Surely one of you has a spare undergrad to look at this, and connect it to Tanenhaus’ arguement that the Book Review (and similar) perform a critical “gatekeeper” function.

Dr. Science, I admire your complex reading of the NYTeaLeaves, but the answer to why the Times sometimes reviews the same book twice is far less interesting. The Sunday Book Review section and the daily book reviews are entirely separate sections, and they assign reviews separately. So Tanenhaus may assign a book to be reviewed at the same time as Kakutani (or whoever her boss is–I assume it’s the Culture editor, so Jon Landman) either takes on a review herself or assigns it. So it’s less a case of plotting about what books will be big or what reviews will be nasty than it is that the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing.

Q. Why are the same books often reviewed in both the daily and Sunday editions of The Times? It seems odd to have Michiko Kakutani scald John Updike for his novel “Terrorist” when a laudatory review of the book, by Robert Stone, graced the cover of the Sunday Book Review. Varied reviews of important books may have merit, but this duplication reduces the number of books selected and has been practiced even for books panned by both reviewers.

— A. Robert Smith, Virginia Beach, Va.

A. Simply put, the answer is that the Sunday Book Review has a different editor, Sam Tanenhaus, and a staff that is independent of the culture department of the daily newspaper. We are separate entities. It’s a setup that harks back to the old days, when there was a whole separate staff for the Sunday news department and the two outfits, daily and Sunday, regarded each other warily — like “a collection of autonomous and warring fiefdoms,” as Alex Jones and Susan Tifft put it in “The Trust,” their history of The Times.

No more, I am happy to say. Relations between our departments are exceedingly cordial. But the fact is, we don’t coordinate our coverage of books, nor should we. Readers come to the daily newspaper for the criticism of particular reviewers: our lead critic, Michiko Kakutani; Janet Maslin; and William Grimes. (We use freelance critics sometimes, for books by Times writers, for instance, or for books that demand a specific expertise.) Readers on Sunday come to the Book Review to read the work of freelance critics (and, occasionally, Times writers) paired up with particular books for particular reasons.

The overlap leads, sometimes, to very different opinions about a book; sometimes it leads to a double-barreled pan, or rave. This, I think, is probably a good thing. In books as in so much else, opinions vary. I’m glad we can reflect that in some areas of our coverage.

It’s also worth noting that the Times almost exclusively double reviews books from large publishers that happen to buy a lot of ad space for the book. Richard Ford and Curtis Sittenfeld (writers I like, by the way) not only got double reviewed, each also had a fluff culture piece in the Arts section upon the book’s publication–in Ford’s case for The Lay of the Land, two fluff pieces.

I, too, wondered what was going on when I first read McPherson’s review of Keegan’s Civil War book. I told a friend that I thought it “a polite evisceration.”

I think it worth noting here that the quality of Keegan’s work has been going steadily downhill for two decades. To call “idiosyncratic” his _A History of Warfare_, or _Fields of Battle_, or _The First World War_ is to give these works far too much credit. Each contains major factual errors, each ignores important events that run contrary to his argument, each relies on a very limited and at times one-sided set of sources, and each is, at times, wildly illogical. That his work on the Civil War is so deeply flawed cannnot, then, be much of a surprise.

As to McPherson’s motives, allow me to suggest this: For years Keegan has savaged Sir Michael Howard and Peter Paret for their Clausewitzian view of war (the above works, esp. _History of Warfare_ are part of that attack). I’m guessing that McPherson’s review was as much a product of what he thought was a hack job by a hack on two respected colleagues as it was a product of his unhappiness with the book itself.

Actually, Ari – doing some reading on the Lipstadt-Irving trial (just on Wikipedia, so it may not be correct), I think Evans is being ever so slightly unfair to Keegan. Certainly it speaks, uh, poorly to his taste in character that he thinks a gibbering Hitler-lover like Irving is some sort of delightful raconteur and Lipstadt is a terrible (female) greasy grind. But Keegan didn’t volunteer to testify on Irving’s behalf; he refused to testify until Irving subpoenaed him. I’m not sure whether Keegan didn’t want to testify because he thought it would be bad for him professionally, because he found Irving’s lawsuit distasteful, or because he (quite rightly) didn’t want to admit under oath that he found a Jew-hating schmistorian an insightful writer, but it’s not quite as cut and dried as that passage from Evans makes it seem.

Lying About Hitler is a splendid book about the mechanics of the historian’s craft — to which David Irving was a complete stranger. I was far more distressed about John Erickson testifying on his behalf than John Keegan. Erickson has done some solid work in the field of military history, while it’s my belief that Keegan has little of substance to his credit. He has written some popular history of note, but really not all that much of that, and has yet to make an important contribution to the field.

The review is obviously cutting, but is McPherson really “not pulling any punches”? The review makes the book seem worthless and error-filled, certainly. But it’s also polite, and it spends a lot of time praising Keegan’s career as a whole.

I’d add that before he gets to the factual errors, McPherson talks about the way the book “fulfills such high expectations.” He then proceeds to give some examples of what he calls Keegan’s “deft turns of phrase” in portraying “the weaknesses and strengths of the war’s principle commanders”. Reading those, they are indeed well-written assessments, but seem to me, at least, to be entirely unoriginal. McClellan was a bad general because he was unwilling to fight? Grant was a good general because he was, and understood strategy? Lee was a great tactician, but not much more than that? Did we really need Keegan to write a book to tell us this?

A reviewer who really wanted to savage Keegan could point this out explicitly. McPherson chooses not to. To those with some familiarity with the subject, these examples of what is supposedly “good” about the book demonstrate pretty well how pointless the book is, but it is still given as praise. Which is to say – McPherson is pulling his punches here.

I’ve been reading John Keegan’s stuff for years, and sadly, I’ll have to second the notion that his output has begun to dwindle in quality over his past few books. I was appalled to see the two NYT reviews point out the huge number of factual errors and overlooked concepts his “Civil War” seems to contain (I haven’t read it yet) – especially as Sir John most definitely knows better. I have a copy of his “Warpaths” (1995) on my shelf, in which Keegan amply demonstrates his first-hand grasp of American geography – especially its military geography – river lines, harbors, mountain gaps, etc., both in the pre-rail and railroad eras. It’s just astounding that he would forget or ignore this stuff only fourteen years later in favor of commonplace “potted history” as he has apparently done.

What Ralph said about John Erickson, and I’d agree with everybody’s else’s comments on Keegan, particularly his recent stuff.

That said, although The Face of Battle is an essential book to read as a thought-provoker, I’m becoming less and less convinced by the fine details of his three set-piece recreations as time goes by – his analysis of Napoleonic warfare, for example, seems a bit simplistic (e.g. not really addressing the practical/moral effects of skirmishing/being skirmished comes to mind). Paddy Griffith’s two books on tactics of the American Civil War and the British Army’s evolution post the Somme offer a useful advance, I think, despite their polemical tendencies to overstatement.

McPherson’s review has the air of a professor grading a term paper and trying hard to find something good to say about it, before tearing into it. “You do manage to say what everyone already knows about Grant,” etc.

The _New York Times Sunday Book Review_ is a different publication than the newspaper, with a separate staff. That most people read the _Sunday Book Review_ bundled with the paper confuses many people, but in fact the SBR is available to the trade the previous Tuesday, and in the book trade everyone knows it’s a separate publication from the newspaper.